BLACK HISTORY MONTH

MARCUS GARVEY Nationalist (1887-1940) To some people he was a charlatan, a naïve dreamer; to others a messiah “You cannot scare the Negro anymore. The Negro is a man. We represent the new Negro. His back is not yet to the wall.” To himself, Marcus A. Garvey was the Negro’s best hope of finding dignity and honor, not in America, but in his original home of Africa. Coming to America from Jamaica in 1916, Garvey found dissatisfaction, discontent, and frustration among millions of Negroes pushed northward by oppressive conditions in the South during World War I. Within two months, Garvey had recruited 1500 followers for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A). Five years later he claimed upwards of one million members. A short, stocky, dark man possessing a shrewd sense of crowd psychology, Garvey preached economic independence and the return of Negroes to Africa as the solution to being a “Negro” in the western world. In 1921, he called an international convention which attracted thousands of Negroes to New York City from twenty-five countries, and laid the foundation for a steamship company, The Black Star Line, and the Negro Factory Corporation as devices for business and industry among Negroes. For five years, Garvey led many of the discontented masses in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and other cities. He praised everything black and was suspicious of everything white. He formed the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the Universal African Motor Corps, and the Black Flying Eagles. His newspaper, “The Negro World,” carried his views and information about the U.N.I.A to all corners of the country. While millions in the masses fallowed him without hesitation, Negro intellectuals were skeptical of him and his promises. In 1925, Garvey was imprisoned for using the United States mails to defraud in connection with the sale of stock in his Black Star Line, and his dream began to fade. After serving two years in prison, he was deported from America and died in London in 1940, a lonely and penniless man. Marcus A. Garvey captured the interest of the ordinary Negro as no other leader before or since, but his dream was based on a fatal flaw. His failure to understand that the overwhelming masses of Negroes considered America their rightful home and had no real desire to leave it. His weakness lay in thinking that the Negro, after helping to build America, would abandon it. His greatness lies in this daring to dream of a better future for Negroes somewhere on earth.